The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  From its austere opening moment until its emotional climax, The Searchers is a mythic tale, only loosely connected to historical reality—“a myth based on other myths based themselves on still other myths,” wrote the critic Tag Gallagher.

  Its pioneers are eking out a hardscrabble existence in a setting as unyielding as the Sahara; its Comanches are mythic apparitions that Gallagher called “icons of savage violent beauty and dread … projections of white fantasy.” It is a psychological drama, obsessed with race and sexual violation and fear of the other. The audience sees very little violence in The Searchers; what we witness instead are the devastating effects of violence on those who survive.

  Ethan Edwards is the Man Who Knows Indians, a worthy successor to Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo and to the image that Cynthia Ann Parker’s uncle James had sought to project in his own troubled narrative more than a century earlier. Ethan is the person you’d most want by your side in a dangerous situation. “I wish Uncle Ethan was here, don’t you?” Ben Edwards says to his mother, Martha, as Comanche raiders close in on the Edwards homestead. On this we all can agree. He is, after all, John Wayne—reliable, undefeatable, strangely menacing, as powerful and invulnerable as Monument Valley itself.

  Wayne dominates. Ford usually films him from middle distance, so we can see his body as well as his face. He is controlled and heavy, yet somehow loose. When he twirls his pistol, it is with a knowing and flexible motion. When he swings his rifle into action, flinging its buckskin sheath to the ground, he is ready to kill. The only time he tenses up is in the winter scene when he goes crazy with bloodlust and kills as many bison as he can, and it’s the one moment in the film when he’s less than totally convincing. More often he’s cold and deliberate—taking aim with his rifle at Scar from a distance, or smiling with icy pleasure as he shoots the eyes out of the Comanche corpse. It is a monumental performance, one that has slowly come to be recognized as one of the greatest in film history.

  Then there is the psychological drama of Ethan and Scar, two blood enemies who are wounded warriors and effectively two sides of the same mirror. When they finally meet, they trade knowing insults. “You speak good American for a Comanch—someone teach you?” declares Ethan as he goes to enter Scar’s teepee. Scar retorts with equal contempt: “You speak pretty good Comanch—someone teach you?” Ethan wants to do to Scar what Scar has done to him: destroy his family and steal and kill his women. Yet, just like Ethan, Scar has reasons for his brutality: he reveals that his own two sons were killed by whites. “For each son I take many scalps.” Ethan can at least understand the grim equation.

  Behind these rich, complicated men is John Ford, mythmaker and storyteller. With every choice Ford makes, he reduces the exposition of Nugent’s final script, hacks away at dialogue and explanation, replaces literal certainty with subtle ambiguity. There is much about The Searchers that seems makeshift and haphazard. In the opening scene, a Navajo blanket sits atop a fence at one moment, then vanishes the next. There’s no continuity in the chase scene: Comanche warriors are within a few feet of the Rangers one moment; then in the next the Rangers are halfway across the San Juan River with the pursuing Indians far behind. Later on in the winter Cavalry scene, a discerning eye can catch a station wagon in the distance lumbering incongruously down a road at the top edge of the shot. At the end of the film, Ethan races after Debbie on the flat plain outside the Indian village, then Ford cuts to a cave on a hillside. There’s an almost willful sloppiness at work that in later pictures—Two Rode Together and Cheyenne Autumn—becomes fatal to the films’ meaning and ambitions. But in The Searchers none of it matters. If Ford is sloppy around the edges, sacrificing continuity and visual coherence, he is precise at the core.

  One thing he has working for him is a tight, remorseless narrative that establishes its tension early and never relaxes its grip. The first third of the film is almost perfect in its power and pace. It introduces us to the Edwards family and then slaughters most of them, sending the survivors on an epic search to save the remaining members. We come away keen to know if Ethan and Martin will find Debbie and what will happen when they do. The question, unresolved, keeps us riveted even when the story itself slows down for detours.

  Ford hides in front of us the secret love between Ethan and Martha in virtually every early shot, yet no words are spoken and the casual viewer could miss it altogether. Ford also strips away several obvious references in Nugent’s script, leaving us with a hint of doubt as to whether this love was ever expressed in words, let alone consummated.

  The film’s other intense relationship is between Ethan and Martin. It starts out with great abuse and contempt on Ethan’s part, and abundant deference on Martin’s, who recognizes Ethan’s authority, superior knowledge, and skills when it comes to understanding and fighting Comanches. Some have compared it to the relationship between Ford and Wayne—the demanding, abusive father figure and the talented, sensitive son. But over the course of the film the dynamic between the two subtly changes. Ford quietly records the growing admiration that Ethan develops for Martin’s moral courage and conviction, while Martin begins to harbor deep doubts about Ethan’s motives and sanity. Jeffrey Hunter’s performance, while less commanding than Wayne’s, is powerful and compelling. Hunter has to shout and storm to match Wayne’s quieter power, but he usually holds his own. It is Martin who in the end kills Scar and rescues Debbie, and Martin who gets to return home, rebuild the remains of his shattered family, and resume a normal life with the woman he loves, while Ethan is banished to the desert itself, condemned “to wander forever between the winds”—the same fate as the Comanches he has dispatched to eternity.

  The Searchers is filled with stunning visual tableaux. There is the Edwards family funeral early in the film, set on a forlorn hill with a wagon at lower right, a cluster of mourners in the middle, and the graves at the top as the worshippers sing “Shall We Gather at the River” until Ethan loudly insists on cutting the ceremony short so that he and the Rangers can resume the search for Lucy and Debbie. And there is the search party in a valley as Comanche warriors suddenly appear on both sides of the screen as if rising out of the land itself, riding parallel and silhouetted against the sky. And there is Debbie plunging down the side of a distant sand dune to warn Ethan and Martin that Scar and his men are coming to kill them. And, of course, there are the opening and closing shots, framed in the eternal doorway, of Ethan arriving and leaving. “These shots,” the critic Roger Ebert has written, “are among the treasures of the cinema.”

  The final shot of Ethan walking away, filmed from inside the doorway of the Jorgensen ranch, is one of American cinema’s most eloquent. The mission is accomplished, but there is no place for the avenger in the new civilization he has helped forge. Ford cannot kill Ethan—John Wayne is simply too strong to die—but he can exclude him.

  With so few written notes to go by, there is only one way to document the creative decisions John Ford made on the set: by comparing Nugent’s final shooting script to what actually appears on the screen. Nugent’s script is justifiably considered one of the great Hollywood screenplays. And yet an astonishing fact emerges: every time he has the opportunity, Ford chooses to reduce or eliminate altogether the dialogue and exposition, substituting lyrical ambiguity for the prosaic clarity of the script. Given the choice between more words and less, Ford opts every time for less—and every time, in retrospect, he makes the right choice. It is here, in the consistent discipline of Ford’s narrative decisions, that The Searchers becomes more than just a good Western; it becomes a work of cinematic art.

  As always, Ford steadfastly refused to acknowledge that The Searchers contained any intellectual content, yet the film overtracks the themes and claims of one of the most high-end discussions of the meaning of the Western: a 1954 essay titled “The Westerner.” Its author, Robert Warshow, a tall, slim New Yorker who was an editor at Commentary magazine, was obsessed with movies, comic books, theater, and other forms of popular cu
lture at a time when such matters were deemed less than legitimate subjects for intellectual discourse. Although there is no evidence to suggest that either Ford or Nugent ever read it, the essay reads like a blueprint for Ethan Edwards. It captures the moral and spiritual fragility of the Western.

  Like Ethan, Warshow’s classic Western hero suffers from a loneliness and isolation that are “organic, not imposed on him by his situation but belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness.”

  Similarly, Warshow focuses on the contradiction at the heart of Ethan’s character—that his code of honor is both admirable and morally repugnant at the same time: “The truth is that the Westerner comes into the field of serious art only when his moral code, without ceasing to be compelling, is seen also to be imperfect … a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity; this ambiguity arises from the fact that, whatever his justification, he is a killer of men.”

  This is Ethan Edwards, his code of vengeance and justice tainted by his racism and bloodlust. In the end, as Warshow anticipates, Ethan’s victory requires him to be exiled from others.

  “The pictures … end with his death or with his departure for some more remote frontier,” Warshow writes. “… What we finally respond to is not his victory but his defeat.” Warshow died suddenly and prematurely in the spring of 1955 while The Searchers was still being planned. Yet no essay has ever captured more precisely the ethos of the film.

  Warshow made no reference to the other moral dilemma at the heart of the film: its morally compromised treatment of Native Americans. The Western film critic Jon Tuska has called The Searchers “one of the most viciously anti-Indian films ever made … The entire film is in effect an argument in favor of killing Indians as the only solution to the ‘Indian problem.’ “

  Ford’s racial attitudes may have been concealed behind a façade of paternalism toward his Navajo wards and Indians in general, Tuska argues, but it is racism nonetheless, and Tuska has no time for those who defend Ford’s films as mythical in their content and intent. “What these apologists forget … is that Native Americans are not mythical and that the lies told about them in Ford’s Western films could scarcely be expected to engender any greater social and cultural understanding …,” Tuska writes. “What apologists really mean by a ‘mythic’ dimension to a Western film is that part of it which they know to be a lie but which, for whatever reason, they still wish to embrace.”

  Native Americans themselves tend to be less offended by The Searchers. JoEllen Shively, a graduate student in philosophy at Stanford University in the late 1980s, arranged for Indian and Anglo focus groups to watch the film for her Ph.D. dissertation. She reported that 60 percent of the Indians and 50 percent of the whites identified with John Wayne, and 40 percent of Indians and 45 percent of whites with Jeffrey Hunter. None of the Indians identified with Scar.

  Equally curious, some of the Indians noted and appreciated the humor in The Searchers, while none of the Anglos did. But both Indians and whites rooted for the good guys and both viewed the Indians in the film as the bad guys. “John Wayne, he’s always cool, yet tough and strong,” said a Native American mechanic. “He doesn’t take anything from anybody.”

  Tom Grayson Colonnese, a Sante Sioux and director of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Washington, writes that “asking Indians to watch a John Wayne Western is like asking someone if they would like to go back and visit the schoolyard where they used to get beat up every day.”

  Colonnese praised the film for depicting “the terrible effects of hate and prejudice, and seems to say that life can only go on if one triumphs over these emotions.” Scar cannot let go of his hatred and therefore he dies; Ethan is able to soften his at the last moment and is allowed to live, albeit in emotional exile. The film, Colonnese concludes, “goes further than any other Western of its day in the direction of truth and fairness; but finally The Searchers was frustrating to us because it stops well short of being truly fair.”

  Colonnese’s critical reading is hard to dismiss. Indians in The Searchers for the most part are rapists and killers, and the only benign Indian we meet is made the butt of a cruel and painful joke. “Look” is a chubby young Comanche woman whom Martin encounters while he and Ethan are searching for Debbie among the many forts and trading posts of Indian Territory. Ford plays this sequence for laughs. After a particularly elaborate exchange of goods with a group of reservation Comanches, Martin finds himself trailed by the woman, who informs him that he has acquired her as his wife as part of the trade. To send her back to her people would be an insult. Ethan takes cruel pleasure in Martin’s faux pas. “Come along, Mrs. Pauley, join our merry crew!” he proclaims.

  As they camp for the night, Ethan continues to mock Martin and his new “wife.” Martin recoils when Look spreads out her blanket and lies down beside him. He plants his foot in the small of her back and sends her sprawling down a hill. Ethan breaks out in laughter.

  Martin’s vicious kick is a despicable act and totally out of character for him. But Ford genuinely means for us to find it funny. After all, here is a man who kicked Harry Carey Jr. in the rear every day on the set of 3 Godfathers and casually slapped and punched other actors throughout his career. He thought it was funny. In this regard, his instincts betray him on film just as they betrayed him in life.

  Still, a few minutes later in the picture, Ford evokes a far different response. The two men question Look about Scar, and it’s clear she’s frightened by the name. Later during the night Look flees but leaves behind a sign for Ethan and Martin to follow. Perhaps she wants to help them find Debbie; as usual, Ford refuses to spell out the motives of his character, leaving it for us to decide. Not long after, Ethan and Martin come across the smoking ruins of the Indian village, where they find Look’s body among the corpses: she is one of those who has been slaughtered by soldiers in the Washita River massacre.

  Even Ethan, the proud Indian hater, is repulsed by the sight, and he places Look’s hat gently over her corpse. Are we supposed to hate the racism with which Ethan and Martin treat Look, or approve of their moral indignation when they find her dead body?

  Just as in LeMay’s novel, the most brutal racist sentiments in the film are spoken by Laurie Jorgensen. But Ford intensifies the hatred by having her deliver them while dressed in her white gown after her wedding to Charlie McCorry has been aborted following Martin’s unexpected return home. Laurie demands that Martin give up the search for Debbie and let Ethan finish the mission alone. And when Martin refuses to comply, she explodes.

  “Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He’ll put a bullet in her brain! And I tell you Martha would want him to!”

  “Only if I’m dead!” Martin replies.

  Laurie’s outburst might be forgiven: she’s desperate to keep Martin at home, protect him from harm, and preserve her one chance for happiness, and she is willing to resort to any argument to get what she wants. But Ford wants to make clear that Ethan’s violent and racist obsession is not just his personal psychosis but the community norm; even our spunky Laurie—a young woman we are meant to admire and sympathize with throughout the film—is not immune. Still, we know Laurie is wrong: the Martha we meet in the first act of the film would never have wanted Ethan to kill her daughter. Martha, like Mrs. Jorgensen and ultimately Debbie herself, would have wanted the bloodshed to end. And Martin is their willing agent. The Searchers ultimately is the triumph of this feminized vision of civilization—loving, inclusive, conciliatory—over Ethan and Scar’s macho war without end.

  Are these Ford’s attitudes or the attitudes of the characters in the film? And can Ford be excused for his distorted depiction of Indians by saying they are mythic, fictional forces rather than realistic depictions?

  Even Ford biographer Joseph McBride, one of the greatest and most magnanimous students of Ford’s work, says he cannot decide. “The film is not an aberration but a crystallization of all the fears, obsessio
ns, and contradictions which had been boiling up under the surface of Ford’s work since his return from World War Two,” he told me. “Ford undercuts the morality of the noble quest for Debbie. Instead of rescuing the damsel in distress, he seeks to kill her. What the film does that is very daring and honest is it gets you into the whole racist mind-set in a way that makes us very uncomfortable.”

  We are, of course, a long way from the original tale of Cynthia Ann Parker. She is no longer the legend’s principal focus nor its abiding concern. Ford has literally moved the camera from focusing on the external search and turned it instead on ourselves, our deepest fears, and our prejudices.

  What ties the two tales together is the masculine-feminine dichotomy. Men have traditionally driven the narrative—from the young Comanche warriors who massacred the settlers and abducted Cynthia Ann Parker (and Debbie Edwards), to the alleged historians who wrote, rewrote, and made up the account that became the accepted history, to Alan LeMay and John Ford themselves. The theme they rang was the painful, bloody, but inevitable triumph of white civilization: How the West Was Won. The underlying psychosexual theme was the protection and preservation of white women from the forces of barbarism. Cynthia Ann’s (and Debbie’s) permanent stain was having sex, voluntarily or not, with Comanches. But while the men were the dominant storytellers, several enterprising women came along over the decades to undermine those themes or at least humanize them.